years later for him to stand up and defend that decision is unexplicable. on the same timeline i had a case in my office, i was an appellate chief about making pornography with young victims. the sentence received was not the maximum sentence but it was long enough to keep that defendant in jail functionally for the rest of his life and she was outraged. she wanted to appeal to the judge. she wanted every last minute, every last day she was entitled to of this sentence. that s how strongly prosecutors feel about these cases and about protecting young children. i don t understand acosta s point of view here. i want to ask you about the role of money. we talk a lot about mischarge of justice for women. acosta trotted out this ludicrous argument about things were so different, it wasn t 1907. it was 2008. but money seems to be the variable, not a point in time.
picture. i continue to say that s why we see public corruption prosecutors involved in this sdny case. you know also to what frank was saying about how the pressures are only going to step up on acosta in florida, there s another piece of this in new york with i think the other shoe to drop, which is what kind of records did jeffrey he steep have in his vaults? are there films or photographs? yeah, ashley s paper had reported in an address book he had 12 entries for the trumps. that was originally gawker had it out for years. he s a meticulous notetaker. meticulous notetaker. camera and security in all of his homes. whether or not he was blackmailing people who funded his, quote, money management firm. because i don t think he was actually managing money. the issue that arises is trump had an alliance with david
hopefully he will now. hopefully he will. but the thing i found, obviously, you can tell by the tone of my perspective, the thing that i found so troubling, disheartening and really unbelievable was the way that acosta has described the challenge he had, because it s like saying it s really difficult to make an omelet. well, get out of the kitchen if you don t know how to cook. ashley, this is something i ve heard from the right and the left in the legal community this week. any thoughts on sort of how acosta s i know the performance was viewed as passable from the president s perspective and the white house, but the legal arguments are not holding up with the test of time. well, there is a sense again in the white house that he sort of initially, he made a somewhat forceful case for why he made that decision at the time. but in talking to people as the week progressed, there was also
53-page indictment. why don t we reference that lest we let the facts get too far. facing a 53-page federal indictment, epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life. but a deal was struck, an extraordinary plea agreement, that would conceal the full extent of epstein s crimes and the number of people involved. that one sentence or one paragraph, two sentences seems at the moment to be the sum total of alex acosta s legacy. at the time that acosta made this decision, doj guidelines for prosecutors required us to charge the most serious, readily provable offense in a case. so for acosta to abandon this indictment that he had prepared, it was supported by evidence with victims who were willing to come forward, is inexplicable. and in mind siengt nhindsight a
florida that handled the case, the police officers who interacted with those agents and prosecutors. and they re going to figure out what was the phone activity, who was dangled money, cash, jobs by epstein and/or his cutouts, and where are these people today? who objected to the deal in the u.s. attorney s office? and was that documented or not? your colleague bob costas said something on this program wednesday that sort of sent a chill up my spine. he said that what every journalist in the country woorj his or her salt worth pursuing is the answer to what was trump s knowledge? what was trump s knowledge of jeffrey epstein s conduct? i haven t seen that reported out anywhere but i wonder your theory of that case. well, we know just from that one comment that has gotten some attention, i believe it was to new york magazine in 2002, that the president had at least some general awareness. there s that quote where he